Still Life, Never Still

Cameras and radio drift and distort — Marsalis's reminder that we are not the center of the world.

I. The Screen Never Replays

Walking into Chisenhale Gallery's Still Life (10 July – 6 September), the first thing visitors meet is a steep ramp built on scaffolding. It resembles the raked floor of a cinema before the seats have gone in, or a piece of temporary construction still underway. At the top of the ramp is a screen the size of a cinema screen. There is no other light source in the gallery — the sea, a sunset, a factory, a bird's nest, a car park, and a dock light up in turn, their glow crossing the central passage and falling on the audience.

The image changes roughly every thirty seconds. These are not pre-recorded clips, but live feeds from unsecured webcams scattered around the world. Marsalis filtered a set of usable signals, then had a program cycle through them. What a viewer sees at any given moment is decided by the weather, the time of day, and whatever vehicle happens to be passing through the camera's location. No scene ever returns in exactly the same form twice.

At first glance these images resemble the landscape screensavers that play when a computer goes idle. Sit a little longer and the difference slowly comes into focus. The landscape does not adjust its composition for the viewer, and it is not responsible for producing something worth watching within thirty seconds. The sea may go the whole time without a boat; the car park may see no car pull in; the bird's nest may hold no bird. The lens has already opened, but the world does not cooperate with its performance.

Marsalis first learned of insecam.com from a YouTube "iceberg" compilation video. The site collects unsecured webcams from around the world, open to anyone. What drew him in at first really was the desire to peer into strangers' lives. But the longer he watched, the more human traces receded into the background. Clouds moving, light falling, a rarely used machine waiting in a corner — changes almost too slow to be called events came to occupy his attention.

He once watched a pizza vending machine continuously for six months. For most of that time the frame held only two green lines hanging from the ceiling. Then one day the machine suddenly activated: it retrieved a frozen pizza, unwrapped it, loaded it into the oven, and ejected the finished product. The whole sequence lasted only a few minutes, but its meaning came from the long emptiness that preceded it. Without six months of waiting, it would have been nothing more than a machine completing an ordinary task.

What surprised Marsalis even more was that these cameras gave him, for the first time, a felt, sensory understanding that the earth is round. As night falls over London, another coastline is brightening; the clouds sit low in one feed while sunlight has just reached a factory outside another. The shape of the earth was no longer knowledge from a map or a textbook — it became light, arriving simultaneously from many unrelated machines across different time zones.

II. The Broadcast, Compressed Into a Hum

Near the screen hang four electrostatic speakers manufactured in the 1980s. They receive the same local FM broadcast, but do not play the programme normally. An algorithm periodically captures a still of the broadcast signal, then converts that still image back into sound. Because a "photograph" does not keep changing the way the original signal does, the news, the music, and the voices compress into a long, drawn-out tone, close to a hum, occasionally retaining a fragment of unrecognisable rhythm.

The four programs use different capture intervals. Some update every thirty seconds to two minutes; others wait twelve to fifteen minutes. Each sound drifts at its own pace, briefly converging once an hour before separating again. The synchronization lasts only an instant — like four clocks running at different speeds that happen to strike the hour together.

Marsalis chose these old-fashioned speakers partly because they don't immediately register as music. Once a sound is recognized as music, listeners start looking for melody, rhythm, and structure, and start waiting for a section to end. The hum here offers no such order. It has a source, but it cannot take you back to that source. The radio may be broadcasting news, or someone may be singing — after the conversion, the specific content has vanished, leaving only the trace that a signal once existed.

The algorithm's concept comes directly from Pauline Oliveros's Tuning Meditation. Participants take turns singing a note; on hearing others' voices, each chooses a new note. There is no conductor and no predetermined ending. Marsalis learned the exercise from a bandmate, who used it as a warm-up before rehearsals. He quickly found that this openness does not come naturally as relaxation — no one knows where the sound will be carried, and every participant first has to accept that they cannot control the whole.

In Still Life, this dependence is handed over to four machines. The radios listen to each other, and each drifts away on its own. Whether the audience is paying attention does not affect whether the sound keeps changing. After the gallery closes, the signal still exists — it simply has no ear to catch it, for the moment.

Marsalis also makes music under the name Slauson Malone 1. This musical background doesn't need to be elevated into an allegory of identity — it offers a more direct clue instead. When he works with images he rarely treats a picture as something that needs to be fixed in place; he is more concerned with entering, lingering, drifting, and disappearing. The image here also has rhythm, and sound, too, can leave behind something like a still-life fragment.

He has said he doesn't trust "looking," because vision completes its judgments too quickly. The eye tells you that something is red, or large, or far away, but it often leaves out the process by which it arrived at the eye in the first place. The screen in Still Life appears to place vision at the center, yet the work keeps reminding the viewer that every image has passed through a camera, a network, compression, and an algorithm's selection. What we see was never only the landscape — it also includes a transmission path that is usually kept hidden.

The sound installation makes this path even more visible. The broadcast first becomes an image, then is translated back into sound — each conversion loses part of the original content. The distortion doesn't obscure the work; it is what the audience finally hears.

III. A Camera Pointed at the Sun

Accessing other people's cameras without permission is not easily resolved as an ethical question just because no people appear in the footage. Marsalis admits his method carries an element of trespass, and says he isn't especially concerned with ownership. As he sees it, no one can own "what is currently happening." A camera happening to point at the sun does not mean the sun, or the light at that moment, belongs to whoever owns the device.

This line opens up an appealing direction for the work, but it doesn't resolve everything. No one owns sunlight, but the camera and its network connection do have a specific person who set them up. That a device has no password only means it can be accessed — it doesn't automatically prove that whoever installed it consented to having the footage appear in a museum in another city. There is still a distance between being publicly accessible and being actively consented to.

The work's ethical tension arises precisely within that distance. These devices probably originally served small, practical needs — watching over a chicken coop, a dock, a warehouse, a car park. Marsalis extracts these signals from their original purpose and enlarges them onto a cinema screen. A low-resolution image that almost no one was watching thereby gains an audience, an exhibition run, and the attention of an art institution.

He calls these devices a form of surveillance power that is aging. They are inefficient, noisy, fixed in place, often pointed at an empty lot where nothing happens for long stretches of time. Compared with Meta glasses, smartphones, and search engines, they know very little about what they're looking at. The latter don't just record — they identify who you are, infer your preferences, and connect your location to your consumption history. The old cameras see only a small patch of ground; the newer surveillance systems try to assemble a complete person.

But inefficiency does not mean harmlessness. It only makes the shape of the power clumsy and legible. Where the lens is fixed, who can access the signal, where the image is then sent — these questions remain visible. Today's more sophisticated data systems hide the same process inside everyday interfaces; what the user gets is convenience, and they rarely see any longer how the signal was collected and exchanged.

Still Life does not offer a defense for this kind of appropriation. It places the viewer in a slightly uncomfortable position. The sea in front of you is genuinely beautiful, but the source of the image is not entirely clean. The pleasure of looking cannot be fully separated from how the image was obtained.

IV. Waiting for Something to Happen

This isn't the first time Marsalis has been drawn to scenes where "nothing happens." In 2021, on a piece of industrial land awaiting development in Minneapolis, he completed Stadium. Construction crews dug a pit 50 meters wide and 4 meters deep into the ground, and erected seven high-intensity light towers around it. The lighting made it seem as though a match, a performance, or some kind of public ritual was about to take place — but the pit never held any program.

Visitors could walk down into the pit, or circle its edge. The site was large; what happened there was minimal. The work opened during the pandemic, and the sense of emptiness was, as a result, especially concrete. It resembled both a stadium not yet put to use and a crater left behind after an event had already ended. The lights kept insisting there was something here worth watching, but the audience could never find the illuminated center.

Marsalis has called boredom a "gateway drug to reflection." The point of that line is not to praise boredom itself, but that boredom changes where a person's attention goes. Once a clear event fails to arrive, the viewer starts to notice the heat of the lights, the slope of the pit's walls, the windows of a distant building, and what, exactly, they themselves are waiting for.

Still Life carries forward the same patience. The camera points at the sea; thirty seconds later it switches to a car park, then to a dock. The viewer knows a person, a vehicle, or an animal could appear on screen at any moment, and so is inclined to read the current emptiness as a prelude to what comes next. Sit for longer, though, and the waiting itself becomes the experience. The sea doesn't start to change only once a boat passes through it; the car park doesn't gain time only once a car drives in.

A run of programming during the exhibition — talks, broadcasts, screenings — adds different rhythms to the installation. Marsalis's conversation with Mark Leckey, a live broadcast on NTS Radio, and a double bill of Harun Farocki and Dan Graham all bring new sounds and images into the exhibition. None of them resolve Still Life into a conclusion; they simply keep the room in an unfinished state across its two-month run.

V. Still Life, Never Still

"Still life" usually calls to mind fruit, a vase, tableware, fixed on canvas. The objects don't move; the painter is free to arrange light, color, and position, and the viewer returns again and again to gaze at the same image. Time seems to be left outside the frame.

Marsalis uses this title, but fixes nothing on the screen. The landscape changes in real time; the broadcast keeps drifting; compression noise fuses the sky and the water into brief blocks of color. Even if the same camera is selected again, the weather, the light, and whatever passes through the lens have already changed. What "stillness" there is exists only within the few dozen seconds a viewer happens to linger.

This also changes the relationship between the still life and its viewer. In the traditional still life, the painter chooses the objects, arranges the composition, and hands the finished image to the audience. In Still Life, that choice is distributed across the camera's location, the local weather, the state of the network, and the switching program. Marsalis set the conditions of viewing, but he cannot know in advance what clouds the screen will show at three o'clock on any given afternoon.

Technology, here, does not make the world clearer. It brings delay, noise, compression, and mistranslation — and it also lets one person approach, at the same time, many places they would otherwise never have seen. What Marsalis cares about is precisely this incomplete kind of approach. The image cannot substitute for the scene itself, and the sound cannot return to the original broadcast, but the signal, having traveled all this way, still carries the time some place is passing through, right now.

When the viewer leaves the gallery, the sea, the chicken coop, and the car park do not stop along with them. They don't even know who has just seen them. The world was never waiting for our attention before it began to happen.

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